Women Don't MastuRbate! By Hayley White All right ladies let’s have a little heart to heart about taboo. In particular, the taboo around female masturbation. It’s a bitch isn’t it? Especially when you just wanna wack one out but you can’t without feeling this overwhelming guilt and shame that you’re doing something wrong. I was a total prude in high school. In a time where young people were getting to know their changing bodies and getting comfortable with the, you know, urges, I pretty much kept my hands, my eyes, my thoughts above the belt. Even though I came from a very open family whose
table talk commonly included raunchy topics, the idea of sex and sexual pleasure made me wanna puke. The mere thought of even touching myself made me want to jump off a cliff. Apparently, that’s not uncommon. The numbers on a variety of studies around female masturbation prove that either their studies really suck, or women lie. My guess is on the latter. Why wouldn’t women lie about what they do under the covers? Especially when we are constantly ridiculed and shamed for figuring out our bodies. This kind of taboo has been around for a while too and has roots (he he). In the 1700s, masturbation was medicalised as a disease that could lead to insanity and other serious health consequences for women. And in the in the 1900s, the first ever vibrator was created to treat the negative effects of hysteria in women. It wasn’t something based
around female pleasure, it was purely a device for medicine, so of course female masturbation and the idea that women do feel pleasure has always kind of been put on the back burner. During this time, the medical industry was dominated by both men and male perception. For centuries, our understanding of female anatomy has been tainted by the viewpoints of a patriarchal system. When I spoke to Edit Horvath, an Auckland-based sex therapist, she said that the taboo around female masturbation starts at a pretty young age, so how adults react to their young children figuring out that kind of stuff can stick. “Babies and toddlers and young people all work out that it feels good to masturbate, so how grown-ups respond to that establishes whether their kids feel that it is a good thing, acceptable thing, a dirty
